The Lost Art of Homebrewing

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Zymurgy

[Editor’s note: This article appeared in the first issue of Zymurgy magazine, published on December 7, 1978. It was originally published in the November 1935 issues of The American Mercury]

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by Karl F. Zeisler

While rummaging through the basement the other day I came unexpectedly upon a curious and at first unrecognizable bit of mechanism; on examination it proved to be a device I once had purchased hopefully for filtering homebrew. The discovery took me right back to pre-New Deal times, the days before the respectable art of homebrewing faded into a poignant past along with candle-molding, lard-rendering, and curry-combing. Memories returned of agonizing experiments with patent filters, cappers, siphons, bottle washers, and yeast—all those devices which characterized my humble beginning as a homebrewer—and I recalled vividly the last batch I ever concocted, the one I spent an hour wiping off the kitchen ceiling. That catastrophe, on an evening when my wife was entertaining, cured me even without her final ultimatum. Foolishly, I had allowed several bottles to warm up: the second one let go as I pried off the cap and sprayed the whole kitchen, including the supper over which my wife had lovingly labored. I had made the usual mistake of putting my thumb over the bottle, and so the suds lathered my bosom. After the bottle had finished fizzing, the room looked like the scene of a hatchet murder, and there was a good half inch of beer on the floor.

This explosion terminated years of painful, groping experiments, as far as I was concerned, experiments that had often resulted in disaster, occasionally in a fluid that was actually drinkable, and once or twice, as in any hazardous pursuit, in a marvelously delectable, amber-clear, ivory-collared treasure, to be fondled, held up to the light, and sipped delicately—a gift from the gods as rare as truth from a barrister’s lips, and as palatable as manna. It had been made, for all I could ever determine, exactly like the other batches which turned sour, deliquesced into suds, or outdid the Missouri in muddiness; yet there she stood, so help me, like a fan dancer at a ladies’ aid meeting, a masterpiece deserving, if any beer ever did, only one name—Pilsner! Ah, me, if I could but pass on to posterity the secret of those ineffable brews, I would face the prospect of another arid era with fortitude, even anticipation.

Unfortunately, however, all I can do is to record the technique of an art whose beginnings are already lost in antiquity, awaiting exhumation by some doctoral candidate. Professional bierbrauers, made jobless by the Volsteadian ukase, concocted the first wort for neighborhood consumption: it was several years before big business realized the profits inherent in purveying all the ingredients of beer but the water, the collar, and the kick. Even then the dehydrated materials were at first sold surreptitiously, and in ultra-dry territory malt and hop stores were subject to frequent rude visits from the police. Before the Sahara was crossed, however, malt was sold under glorified brands, and even had radio programs dedicated to it. Batch-laying became a recognized profession like piano-tuning, with reputable practitioners making the rounds of the boulevard districts to serve bankers and chiropractors rich enough to escape the drudgery. And in more modest homes, men whose domesticity, under uxorial duress, encompassed nothing more complicated than drying teaspoons, became authorities on sterilizing bottles and dissolving yeast and sugar.

Homebrewing was practiced in upstairs halls, bedrooms, broom closets, telephone booths, and dumb-waiters, but my own technique required an entire basement. Mere dilettantes brewed only five gallons at a time—the quantity made from one can of malt—producing about 45 twelve-ounce bottles. But more sophisticated fermenters like myself made a double batch, netting approximately 85 bottles at a sing ordeal. Purloining the bottles was one of the sobering elements in the whole business, for only plutocrats laid out good money for them, and many a nocturnal scavenging expedition up alleys was undertaken to meet the needs of a confirmed brewer.

Next, you acquired several gross of caps and a capper—and if anyone thinks invention ceased with Edison he should have seen some of the contraptions inventors fondly imagined would affix stoppers to homebrew bottles. There were varieties that stood upright, that nailed on the door jam, that worked with levers and foot-pedals and thumbscrews, that had universal joints, freewheeling, and knee action; but they all broke bottles, pinched fingers and jammed, making the capping job one of the most profane in the entire business. Patent siphons exercised all the ingenuity of a hydrostatic engineer, evolving from a simple rubber tube into elaborate affairs replete with valves, hooks, strainers, bulbs, and four-wheel brakes. Strainers and filters exhausted the gamut of resourcefulness, utilizing everything from pumice to the family Bible as media for separating the malt from its ineradicable sediment; but none of them ever functioned. Sooner or later most of these accessories were thrown violently behind the furnace and you got down to fundamentals.

Aside from collecting an assortment of measuring cups, spoons, kettles, pans, dish towels, and the like, you were ready now to lay a batch. A quart tin of malt was emptied into the big crock, and five gallons, or thereabouts, of water added, along with enough sugar to impart the desired kick. Last, a half cake of yeast was dissolved with water and stirred in vigorously by means of a broom handle or furnace poker. Then you adjourned to the laundry tubs to wash up, and called it a night.

The occult phase came next—fermentation. Ordinarily the process to 72 hours more or less, depending on the temperature, the phase of the moon, and the number of times the furnace was shaken. The first morning produced a fine welter of coarse white suds pushing over the rim of the crock; a little later the foam became flecked with brown, like a scorched meringue; carefully these extrusions were skimmed off the surface of the repulsive fluid scrutinized. Men have been known to crack during these anxious hours, beating their wives, frightening their children, and sending stenographers into convulsions, for it was all-important that the brew be incarcerated in the bottles just as it reached the right turn. Specific gravity meters, litmus paper, and any number of scientific devices were sold to help detect this critical point, but they proved of little value. There were a few gifted individuals who, by looking at the rioting malt, could tell infallibly when it was ready for bottling. But most brewers agreed that when the malt ceased exuding suds and attained a mottled appearance with tiny whit bubbles and clear brown patches, the fateful moment had arrived, usually about the third night and the one which the local dominie invariably called.

Decorum tempts me to pass over the final process of bottling; after all it was purely mechanical. But posterity must know the difficulties as well as the pleasures of homebrewing, and I may as well be frank. To bottle, one donned a bathing suit, waders, fireman’s helmet, and a grim but determined countenance. The bottles were lined up closely around the box whereon sat the crock of brew, high enough to let the siphon function. A half teaspoon, more or less, of sugar was dropped into each bottle; at least you hit as many as you could, with some getting double or triple doses and some getting none at all. (Those overcharged would later taste like maple syrup produced in a kerosene refinery, if they did not blow up; those without any sugar could easily be confused with a solution of green soap.) Then you started to toy with the siphon. Prone, with one cheek on the cold floor, you held one end of the tube deep enough in the solution to draw and not so far as to reach the sediment, put the other end in your mouth, and sucked. Alchemy never produced anything viler than the gush of tepid beer that immediately drenched your tonsils; but you managed, simultaneously, to retch and to divert the geyser from the tube into the nearest bottle. Only a few squirts could be put in at a time, as the foam ran over and made the bottles sticky; so you circulated the hose from bottle to bottle till they were all full, or the siphon ran out with an obscene gurgle. And you had to ladle out the last few bottles, half full of yeasty dregs, which were carefully put aside for your wife’s brother.

Capping, too, was a purely mechanical task. If you survived without six blood blisters and a dozen broken bottles, you considered yourself lucky. If you were fastidious, you wiped the outside of the bottles and put them neatly on a shelf; but most of us just sluiced out the basement with a hose and went wearily to bed. It was considered the mark of an exceptionally masterful spouse if he could boast of making his wife clean the crock.

Commercial brewers speak today with unseemly pride of the age of their beer; this grates on the ear of a homebrewer, for it was universally believed that the homemade stuff would spoil if kept over a month. It required about three days for the clouds of sediment to precipitate, and hardier brewers took their first taste then. It was better, however, to let the shot of sugar complete its work and put a little life in the brew before sampling. There was a delicious instant of expectancy when you finally held a bottle to the light, found it clear to within an inch or so of the bottom, and carefully pried off the cap. If the contents didn’t detonate in your face, the first crisis was passed. Then you tipped the bottle and allowed the contents to glide ever so slowly into the glass, otherwise you would pour nothing but suds; and you always had to guard against complete decantation, too, lest the dregs leave the bottom of the bottle. Finally, you have tasted it. Co-partners in a batch anxiously scanned the features of the first taster. If the grimace was not too demoniacal, sighs of relief were heaved—it was then evident that the stuff could be drunk.

Sermons were preached against homebrewing, and editorials in the dry organs pilloried it as the first station on the road to the Drink Habit, as an evil influence undermining the American home, and as insidiously breaking down moral fiber. Well, I will grant that the manufacture of homebrew was potentially destructive of character, but there was nothing insidious or underhanded about its effects. True, I have heard high school principals, after two bottles, tell stories in mixed company that would bring blushes to the cheeks of a week-end tour stewardess, but I always attributed this potency more to desire than actuality. Prohibition drinking generally was animated by expectancy, so that the effect of whatever quantity of alcohol was imbibed was heightened by a receptive conviction that intoxication must be immediate and inevitable. As for the claim that homebrewing left to chronic inebriation, I submit that exactly the opposite was true.

Unquestionably the cellar art was the greatest force for temperance in the whole insufferable Prohibition era. Practicing it, as I have revealed, was just too damn much trouble.

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